What’s Wrong With AAA Today?

That’s the short title. It fits in a headline. The actual title of this article is “Things that I Saw This Week that Demonstrated What is Wrong With the AAA Game Development Model and Why It Is Unsustainable.” Another real title might be “What I Think About Double Fine’s Million-Dollar Kickstarter and Its Larger Meaning By Way of a Terrible Reality Show.” This is also a blanket warning that I will now proceed to type bad words and link to videos that include bad words.

Two days ago, xtal reported on the Double Fine Kickstarter. It has now generated somewhere north of 1.5 million dollars, over a million dollars more than the original funding goal for the game. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions about the impact of the Double Fine Kickstarter on our current game development system. Like Steerpike, I absolutely believe it could work for established developers with a proven track record of delivering games people want to play. But crowdsourcing is not an ATM for unknowns who are working on their first game.

Instead of trying to make predictions, I want to contemplate why the hell this was even necessary in the first place. Double Fine wanted to make this genre of game, but couldn’t get a publisher to back it, because publishers felt it would not be a big seller. Game publishers are very risk-averse. One-off games that don’t fit an established mold or ride the reputation of an established franchise aren’t impossible to find in the console sphere, but are relatively rare.

David Jaffe said this week that publishers are easy to trick. If you’d like to get a game made, maybe you could crowdsource. Or maybe you could find a sucker, and talk a lot of bullshit. Remember All Points Bulletin? “Let’s combine World of Warcraft with Grand Theft Auto” smelled like money so much to its investors that no one stopped to consider whether or not that could actually work until it was out there: and wasn’t doing so well commercially. The common wisdom is that an “idea for a game” is absolutely worthless, and that is true. But if you’ve got the right pitchman, a slick demo, a rich sucker, and a very risk-averse sounding idea for a game, that might be worth quite a bit to you indeed.

Speaking of Jaffe – what’s he up to these days? I think I saw him in a video recently…

I’m sorry. That was The Tester, the Playstation-sponsored reality show where gamers compete for “the ultimate prize.” Double Fine is going to let us in on the process of game design and development with their crowd-sourced documentary. But the joke is on them: Sony totally beat them to it! If you don’t want to sit through all that footage to learn these inside secrets, I don’t blame you. Game development, as it turns out, involves having Madagascar hissing cockroaches dropped on your head while you get tag-team interviewed about Trophies and farts.

The aforementioned ultimate prize for the gamer who survives this series of indignities is to have an assistant production job – not a QA job, anymore. Now it’s just called “The Tester” – on a new Santa Monica Studios title. That’s a pretty good prize, to be honest, a good foot in the door for any person who should happen to display the knowledge and aptitude. That person will also win a car, so, good deal all around.

I watched this video because of Mumbles, so it’s her fault I’m spreading it around. Like her, I want to draw your attention to one of the contestants on the show: egoraptor, who was voted on as the “fan favorite” by the internet. Here is a thing egoraptor made. Maybe you have heard of him already, and, thus, seen it and several other popular things.

That’s a long one, but you can always find more at his YouTube channel. What this video tells us about egoraptor is: he’s a talented animator, he has a sense of humor (if maybe a little heavy on the punching-girls jokes), and he knows a lot about the principles of game design, enough to talk about them intelligently.

I know it’s just television, but none of these things seem to impress the people of The Tester. What they’d really like to know is: how many Trophies does he have?

This is really just scratching the surface of all the things that are wrong with The Tester video, and, I could really go on all day about it and how it’s pretty embarrassing. So instead of talking about what’s wrong with The Tester, I’d like to ask again: what’s wrong with game development? I don’t want to sound fannish, or anything, but, specifically: what the hell is wrong with game development where a talented animator like that who wants a game job would have to go on The Fucking Tester?

It’s equally mind-boggling that no one would “take a risk” on Double Fine making an adventure game. I don’t have sales figures, but their new small-game studio model appears to be kicking all kinds of ass in terms of quality product and good publicity. Kickstarter was the right move for them this time, not just for financial reasons but because it’s generated a ton of buzz for the new title. But what the hell is wrong with game development that no publisher would toss some investment at this pedigree?

And these are two rhetorical questions: bam, bam, that hit me one right after another. I don’t have the answers or even complete enough information to make a guess. Maybe egoraptor is just doing it “for the lulz.” Maybe Double Fine just really saw this as an opportunity they wanted to try with their current studio model.

But here’s how I feel. The AAA space is mishandled on some fundamental level. It doesn’t reach the audiences it could reach. It doesn’t open itself up very frequently to alternative audiences and new development voices. It’s too hit-driven and too risk-averse and too expensive and too bloated. But the “indie” model is now equally hit-driven and bundle-driven and it too isn’t the only answer. There’s punk and jam; there’s Flash and Facebook; there are more games now than ever and more games than anyone could possibly play. And even though I said I wouldn’t predict, if something does change in game development it’s going to be… gradual. Maybe there will be one day, long from now, when gaming is recognized as a thing everyone does. There will still be the enthusiasts, but the title “gamer” could mean as much as “TV watcher” or “movie goer” instead of being some mutant class of person. We could just like what we like, and find people who make more of that thing for us, no matter what size or shape it turns out to be.

In the mean time: if you do happen to be a person who wants to make games, and has a big following on the internet… I hear good things about Kickstarter…

About the author

Amanda Lange is a teacher, game designer, 3D artist, and technical evangelist. She likes RPGs, horror, action, fighting games, and anything pleasantly quirky. Also, she enjoys writing at great length about same, often posting articles to her personal blog at http://secondtruth.com. In the past, she has worked on educational titles, and taught game design and art in Detroit, MI. She is currently living in the Philadelphia PA area where she works with Microsoft.

The Tester is offensive on so many levels, not the least of which that it devalues and humiliates people who are devalued and humiliated enough. Admittedly on the lower rungs of the development ladder, they are also the mechanism by which games can succeed.

QA testing is one of the most thankless, ill-appreciated, poorly paid jobs in the business. Like members of the Traffic department in an ad agency, testers are the lowest of the low; moreover, the very nature of the job will ruin the entire experience of gaming for many people. Forever. Testing should be glorified as a hard-as-hell job that you do to learn some ropes, but then you get out of, unless you’re one of the rare folks who like it, in which case you should start your own independent QA company. Instead this show humiliates players with challenges that have nothing to do with QA – or Assistant Producer, another job most people outside the industry don’t know, understand, or appreciate.

AAA is in a hard place right now. On the comment thread for xtal’s Double Fine post we’re talking about budgets for AAA games. The industry is pricing itself out of profitability, and seems intent on this course.

Some are too young to remember the Videogame Industry Crash of 1983, a catastrophic event that nearly gutted the medium forever. Are we in a cyclical world, rising and crashing? This time, even if the AAA world collapses, the rise of what I’ve been calling the Super-Indies may just rise out of AAA ash.

Kickstarter won’t work to fund most game projects. You’ll have to be someone who deserves the money to get it; and Double Fine already struck while the iron was hot. We’ll see diminishing returns for most projects that try to fund through Kickstarter from now on. What Double Fine demonstrated was that there are dollars available through other sources than AAA publishers, provided you’re willing to be creative in how you look, and willing to be judicious in how you spend the money you make. The next few months are going to be very, very interesting. Oh yes.

To be sure, I think part of why they have to hold a competition for a QA job is that, for people who are actually in the industry (or trying to get in the industry), it’s pretty clear that that’s one of those jobs that will make you hate video games with a passion. So it’s kinda like…let’s sucker some gamers who don’t really know what goes on into making themselves look like idiots so we can televise it and then give them a job nobody in their right mind would want. No offense, QA testers. We love you, really. You take a bullet for all of us.

Buuut…the thing I see more than anything in AAA gaming right now is really what I see in all major corporate media, not something that’s native to games. The assumption that there’s a stereotypal consumer, that we want the same thing over and over, that what worked last year will work this year and next. What Double Fine’s done is make clear that the indie game market is not only working, but working on a scale that isn’t limited to small teams and small budgets. In a lot of ways, this reminds me of what happened when Radiohead released In Rainbows online and let people pay whatever they wanted for it – and they got quite a bit. It’s a wake-up call that, hey, the old business model where the companies funding projects had power is no longer the only way: creators can do what THEY want and people will support them anyway, and the publishers or record labels or whoever aren’t even in the equation.

The internet is changing everything, and it seems that the big game companies have no more idea what to do about it than record labels, traditional publishers, or film studios. Or, at least, they aren’t willing to risk it.

Again and again in games and music we’ve seen that this sort of liberal monetization – “pay what you want” – has worked. Everything from the Humble Bundle to individual indies like World of Goo and Sleep is Death, when they announced a pay-what-you-want method, almost universally did pretty well. Tied in with what we know to be true about things like Steam Sales (Valve has demonstrated that a 75% price reduction can correspond with an 18,000% increase in unit sales), it says something about how consumers are willing to spend their money. While the AAA of video games, recording industry, movies and so on focus on piracy and constantly jack their prices to combat it, what we’re seeing is that lower prices mean exponentially higher sales figures.

What I’d like to see is just one AAA publisher try something like this. Instead they pull out this “The Tester” crap, which everyone who knows anything about the business realizes is offensive. In the end I think it’s the mainstream that will suffer. Professionals will stay in it only long enough to get the name recognition they need to strike out on their own and find alternative funding mechanisms. The mainstream will never fully go away, and to be honest I wouldn’t want it to – though I would love to see more innovation and growth, and more modern business practices – but the Super-Indies and named auteurs won’t want to be shackled to the publishers unless they have to.

Mat C02/12/2012

Great piece, Amanda.

The only reservation I have about this particular exercise at this particular time is how applicable it would be across the board and across a wider spectrum. Some developers and studio’s enjoy almost “celebrity” status. Tim Schafer is one, the likes of David Jaffe and Cliff Blezsinski are others, just as examples. Everybody knows who they are and what they do. It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that people put money forward to support an adventure game made by Double Fine, especially when the ball started rolling and gaming blogs etc got involved. But would the same work for Joe Bloggs at an otherwise unknown indie start up? Would it even work for other already established developers if they found themselves dropped by a publisher?

It is disappointing though that a studio like Double Fine can’t find a publisher willing to carry a new product. Really disappointing. Putting my above scepticism to one side, it’s really cool that on this occasion and in these circumstances they were able to raise so much money. Personally I’m hoping it means they can continue to fund support for the game, including publishing the game on more platforms, beyond it’s launch.

I definitely think the only way this model can work is if gamers know who they’re investing in. Unknown startups may get some funding, particularly if they make a good sales pitch, but not even a fraction of what Double Fine is seeing.

It might be possible to merge this model with Mount & Blade’s original mechanism: they sold the game unfinished for less than half what they planned to ask, which brought in ongoing revenue so they could finish the game. And of course early adopters got all their updates and patches for free. Once word of mouth about Mount & Blade started catching fire, Tale Worlds did really well. Perhaps an unknown indie could do something similar… assuming, of course, that their game is good.

I basically agree with Steerpike… Kickstarter won’t make a million for just anyone. It can make a little money for someone fairly unknown, or a lot of money for someone known, though. I think it’ll still be a really interesting space to watch in the next few years.

Steerpike – Well pre-beta sales are still all the rage as I bought Kairo last year to see its alpha build (still unreleased).

Amanda – There are game projects on Kickstarter already such as Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero. I guess we’re asking whether publishers can be replaced by crowdsourced funding.

I’m quite cynical about this. Seeing the metamorphosis of discounts and bundles into PR attention wars, I can see direct funding requests turning into the same thing. Everybody will be doing it – and it’s essentially an extreme extrapolation of the pre-order approach, which only works to keep the family fed and clothed if you have some decent attention.

(This will have no bearing doesn’t mean AAA publishers can survive or not. That’s a separate question.)

Brown Fang02/13/2012

Great way to push out a relevant question Amanda (while giving attention to a relatively unknown talent). I like the points you and Steerpike have made.

The answer to what’s wrong with AAA should be obvious: It’s Starbucks.

Now let me explain.

Once upon a time there were these wonderful local businesses called coffee shops. Every town had one and they each had their own distinct flavor, kind of like tiny games companies in the 80s. Folks liked them and they did enough business for a family to live a comfortable, middle-class life. Then, one of those coffee houses got the idea that since his middle-class potential was shriveling due to the fact that his customers hadn’t had a living wage since the 70s, he could make more money if he followed a franchise business model. That was the day his scrappy indie coffee shop started trying on the AAA publisher shoes. By the end of the 90s Starbucks, as the little indie coffee shop came to be known, was globalizing. It takes a ridiculous amount of money to globalize. It also takes a lot of standardization (risk aversion). So, the big, milquetoast, AAA coffee pimp pushed all the cool little mom and pop coffee joints out of business and replaced them with Starbucks franchises. Now, decades later, it’s almost impossible to have a funky little coffee stand that’s profitable, though it happens on occasion. There’s a veritable army of old poets out there bemoaning the loss of mom and pop coffee houses; but, their kids and grandkids have no idea such places existed. Now that you can order a Gears of Warcraft Doppio Cinnamon Latte at the Starbucks nearest you, anywhere in the world, you have no way of knowing that today’s Sid Meier makes an incredible Civilization Frappacino two blocks from your house. Plus, young modern Sid isn’t interested in a comfortable, middle-class living because that doesn’t look like the kind of lifestyle Aston Kutcher or Cliffy B are living. All of this madness insures that unless capitalism collapses tomorrow (hold your breath for that) EA Vivendi Starbucks will be here next year. It also means that you have to be a rock star like Tim Shaffer to get any attention for your new widgit alternative to Battlefield x Tekken ad nauseum.

Unfortunately, the commercial standard for games has risen so high that today’s Jobs and Wozniak duo can’t make it in the games business without a few more people helping them out, all Mojang exceptions aside. Any brilliant game designing kid out there can choose either to follow the incredibly treacherous path of Dear Ester down the decades to notoriety or suck it up and work for the whores who the AAA publishers like at the moment. It’s really not much more glamorous than that. If it were Tim Schaffer wouldn’t want a Kickstarter project because he’d have everything he needed based solely on the collective talents and successes of Double Fine.

Now doesn’t that just make you want another Grand Theft Duty Caramel Americano? Sure it does. 😉

HM: Oops, I hope I didn’t imply that I didn’t know about other indy game projects on Kickstarter. Cool ones crop up all the time. Here’s a local upcoming one I heard about this week (http://velociraptorcannibalism.wordpress.com/purchase-the-game/). But what I’m trying to say is, if it turns in to a “fever,” then the crowd’s money will probably be harder to get over time and people will need big name recognition or at least a loyal fanbase to get it to work. So in other words I agree with you.

Brown Fang is just reminding me of how depressing it was when a Starbucks opened up across the street from my favorite quirky local place in Pittsburgh. I wonder if it’s still there.

The celebrity creators phenomenon is one that I think games in general need to change, though it’s a little tricky to do so. I’ve been taking notes for an essay I want to write sometime soonish on what video games can learn from comics, and to make the creators the stars is definitely one. Comics (and novels, as well) operate on two big draws: brand recognition (“This book is about Batman. Awesome!”) and creator recognition (“This Batman book is written by Scott Snyder! Awesome!”). That’s part of the reason that comics has become an industry lately where, curiously, people tend to START at the big publishers – DC and Marvel – and work their way to indie publishing where they can do creator-owned projects. I don’t think it hurts the brand recognition at all to make clear who’s writing the script or doing the art, and in a lot of ways, that can lead to more sales of other, unrelated books those same people might be doing.

The problem faced by games is that the creators involved are a much larger team, almost always. Dozens if not hundreds of people. In some ways the “celebrity designer” thing hurts because of this. How much does Tim Schafer actually do on your average Double Fine game? I don’t know. But he’s almost certainly not the sole originator of all the design and ideas. You can’t draw a novelist:novel comparison.

Developers gain recognition, of course, but even then, you’ve got essentially brand recognition, not individual recognition. That makes it really tricky to, say, follow people who leave one developer and go to another. And, of course, the staff at the first developer will fluctuate: individuals who help to make one release great may part ways afterward, and the next game with that logo on it might be…less great.

It’s a tricky situation. I wonder if, perhaps, it would be too much to ask to put the names of some of the team leads on the boxes or something? Hurm.

matt w02/13/2012

Brown Fang: On the subject of local coffeehouses, I think it’s not so bleak. As of before the recession they were actually increasing in number.

matt: I looked in to it, and yes, it is gone 🙁 It was called Moon Flight. There’s another coffee place by that name but it’s not the same place. It has a drive-through and dog grooming. As opposed to beaded curtains and board games.

matt w02/13/2012

Oh that’s a pity. I’d never been there; it was pretty far away from my stomping grounds (Squirrel Hill and Oakland, basically).

A little more auteurism in game design is okay with me, provided, as Dix says, there’s a tacit understanding that games aren’t made by one person. Creative visionaries do put an indelible stamp on their games, just as a director or cinematographer indelibly stamp feature films, even though hundreds work on them as well.

In a nutshell, Uncharted could still have been Uncharted without Nolan North; it probably wouldn’t have been Uncharted without Hennig and Lemarchand. A lot of it may come down to gamers themselves getting better-educated on who does what in game development. Some developers create a sort of cult of personality but aren’t uber-developers. Tomonobu Itagaki comes to mind; so does John Romero. Meanwhile a Warren Spector or Tim Schafer, their stamp is on every game they make.

Brown Fang02/13/2012

Personally, I’d hate to see the games industry follow the book publisher or comics model of star worship, especially the comics variety. The comics industry has two bloated publishers, a small set of large outliers and a wasteland of transient indies that barely feed great artists who may have nothing but carpal tunnel syndrome to look forward to. Throngs of people might want to go to San Diego or New York Comic Con; but, they don’t pay much attention to the APE con for those transient indies. The current games equivalent is Xbox Live’s indie marketplace fiasco.

The book publisher model means that even though there are thousands of good writers in workshops all over the country, there’s not enough room on the best seller list for them unless they are proven sellers. It also means that a publisher doesn’t have to consider new artists if it has a stable of old artists who are still producing work.

Hey, that probably means that you don’t have to look for the next Ken Levine as long as he’s making Bioshock games that are blockbusters, right? You just have to make sure Ken’s name is on it. Then you just hope he never gets bored or interested in anything that’s not Bioshock. Oh yeah, that’s already a reality. Great.

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the next fantastic, genre defining game from John Romero (as if I’d played a Romero game in the past 10 years.)

I’m not saying that auteurs aren’t great. I love them. They’re necessary. I’m just saying that there are more great artists out there than there are publishers willing to fund those artists. The massive scale of publishers requires them to move slowly and carefully. I’ve never met a good artist that was best served by the slow and careful path. Have you?

Brown Fang02/14/2012

matt w: just for shiggles, and obviously off topic, you might note that the case for coffee shops can’t be argued by using the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf stores as a reference. I’m not saying this because, as your article points out, “Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores had been filling the caffeine needs of Los Angeles locals and the Hollywood elite”; but, for the fact that those chain stores, so prevalent in California malls, were outside of the true mom and pop shop scene long before Starbucks showed up. I was talking about small, 1 or 2 location stores that made 200,000 to 1,000,000 USD a year, not multimillion dollar strip mall chains that miraculously survived competitive market shrinkage even in the tough days between 1990 and 2007. I was talking about the 4 out of 5 coffee shop owners whose shops I frequented before Starbucks moved in and their revenues dried up (1990-1999). As a SoCal native, I thought the Coffee Bean was an oddity before I ever heard of Starbucks, even though Hollywood is only an hour away on a good day. You’ll be glad to know that there still are CB & TL shops all over California and 1 out of 5 of my favorite local owned shops still exists (woot?).

Still, I guess I should be grateful that multimillionaires made it through the recession with their markets reasonably in tact. This really warms my heart to no end. Really. No, really, it does. 😉

Hey Amanda, yeah I’m not in my most masterful commenting mode at the moment! Given two seconds to think, it would’ve obvious you’d have been aware of other Kickstarter projects.

On celebrity auteur-ism, I’m cynical about that too. I’ve seen Minecraft and World of Goo held up as examples of a “healthy indie industry” in the past when they are not. It just highlights the lottery nature of it: the winners take everything, the also-rans take home some spare change. Success stories often dazzle, obscuring how tough an industry this is to make decent coin.

The reason I’m cynical about all of these things is because the internet has not delivered on its purported promise. It was supposed to create attention and support for all the little things. Every project that required love and cash would be able to find its community. Except that’s not what happened. The internet became a sea of white noise, tiny flickering points desperate for attention; all the internet consumers can do in the face of this noise is point at the same bright lights everyone else is fascinated by, trusting more and more to “More Like This?” and personalized search.

@Brown Fang: I guess you misread me a bit in that I’m talking about the fan culture surrounding books and comics, not the publication one. The publication models for all of these things are assinine. Most fans, though, I find, tend to know better and be more discerning.

All I’m saying in regards to what a publisher would need to do is start noting these things. You wouldn’t publish a novel without making it clear who wrote it, big name or no. With games, though, it’s almost like if books just started coming out that had the author’s name nowhere to be seen (well, okay, maybe on the back in little text) but had POCKET BOOKS plastered on the front in big letters.

Brown Fang02/14/2012

@matt w: I’m not trying to be rude. I don’t take any of this that seriously. Admittedly, I can be a bit acerbic at times. I can’t apologize for that because it’s just part of who I am — and I like me. 🙂 YMMV

Brown Fang02/14/2012

@Dix: I see your point. I don’t agree with it; but, that doesn’t matter in the least. I did enjoy reading your opinion.